Two Free Apps To Sync ANY MP3 Player with iTunes

Apple products are generally more expensive than their competitors. Although the overall user experience of Apple products is better, most people are price sensitive. Which means Creative, Sandisk and the likes still have about 20% of the MP3 player market share.

For those of you who doesn’t have an iPod but use iTunes as their main music player we found two free apps which can be used to sync iTunes with almost any non-Apple MP3 player.

iTunes Agent

iTunes Agent, a project released under the GPL license by Jaran Nilsen and Justin Katz, is available from Sourceforge. The developers say it allows users to sync any MP3 player with iTunes as long as it has the ability to be connected to computer as a USB drive. It can be and MP3 player or even mobile phone.

Configuring iTunes Agent is simple. All the necessary settings are presented in one window and are obvious even to a non-tech savvy person. You can associate the MP3 player with one playlist from iTunes, either normal or smart. Choosing a smart playlist will enable you to refresh songs automatically every time you plug the device in. For instance, associating your MP3 player with some smart “Shuffle” playlist will always put new song collection on your player.

After choosing the device, music folder and associating that with a playlist you’re ready to right click on the notification area icon and select “˜Syncronize devices’. A dialog box will appear with information about the file operations being conducted. iTunes Agent recreates the iTunes folder structure on the MP3 player; Music>Artist>Album. Be careful, because some older MP3 players don’t support going more than 2 levels deep. While testing the current version of iTunes Agent, I never encountered a crash or hang, and the file transfer completed successfully in a short time.

iTunes Sync

iTunes Sync, a program from John Tackabury of Binary Fortress Software, isn’t licensed under the GPL but provides a simpler configuration panel, automatic updates, translations into Spanish and German and a slightly better looking notification area icon.

Both programs tested are free, work with iTunes 8 and require .NET Framework 2.0, which is available for free from Microsoft Update.

Do you know other solutions for syncing MP3 players (other than iPod) directly with iTunes? Have you used one of these programs? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged: iTunes • synchronize

Stefan Neagu

Back in 2007 I started a tech blog on Google's Blogspot platform. After writing a few articles that got popular and generated a significant amount of traffic, I focused on improving my writing and researching topics the were popular with IT people. I found the work rewarding, as I could stay on top of the the latest tech while earning a living. I contributed to a few websites before finally starting my own self hosted blog. The lack of significant advertising revenue meant I had to give up my freedom, at least partially, and join a monolith: MakeUseOf. Working for MakeUseOf helped enhance my skills as well as develop relationships with people in the tech industry. More information can be found at the Tux Geek , LinkedIn and ClaimID.

Czadd

Very handy. Now i just need to find one for the Mac.
http://www.bidigitalframes.com elelctronic photo frames

very guidable manual,i love music,didn’t get an itune though.
ath3na

Does this work with protected audio files? That’s just what I’ve been looking for, if it does.
Wallace

In my younger years I always asked santa clause for toys that came with small balls. Hungry Hungry Hippos, Crossfire, you name it. I would always swallow the balls (5-6 at a time) then try to sift through my shit to find them. I guess thats what makes me a good archaeologist as an adult.
http://n/a clint

is there a program like these, or a way within one of these programs that allows the transfer of itunes playlists to mp3 players?
AmyGeek

Just installed on my Win7 machine and it threw off unhandled exception errors.

AmyGeek

Whoops – should have indicated that this happened with iTunes Agent. Trying iTunes Sync now.

http://www.jukebox-mp3-players.org/ Jukebox Johnny

I really want a jukebox mp3 player designed like this. Where you can skim the album covers or song names down a list. Then it can turn around and your friends can look for a song quickly right from your wrist. Speakers built in. Maybe in the future baby!
http://www.jukebox-mp3-players.org/ Jukebox Johnny

I really want a jukebox mp3 player designed like this. Where you can skim the album covers or song names down a list. Then it can turn around and your friends can look for a song quickly right from your wrist. Speakers built in. Maybe in the future baby!